Jailing of Will Lawther, the Durham leader of the Great Strike

As Memories told last week, the country was shut down, with violence breaking out in many places as police battled with pickets to get food supplies – and copies of The Northern Echo – out to the people.

READ FIRST: HOW THE ECHO DEFIED THE PICKETS TO PRINT TWO MILLION PAPERS DURING THE GENERAL STRIKE

Leading the strike in the North East was Will Lawther, a miner from Chopwell, in Gateshead, which was known as “Little Moscow” due its left-wing politics which Will, a member of Durham County Council from 1925, fully embraced. He was also the Labour candidate for the Parliamentary seat of Barnard Castle.

The Northern Echo of May 11, 1926 (Image: Chris Lloyd)

As our reproduction front page shows, he was arrested on May 10, 1926, and charged with “interfering with food distribution and police intimidation” – it seems he was trying to stop food convoys reaching Consett from Newcastle by blocking the roads. The authorities presented this as an attempt to steal the food and sell it on the black market; Will probably saw it as lawful picketing and making sure the strike committee was in charge of the neighbourhood.

That front page from May 11, 1926, really is a page in history: as well as Lawther’s arrest, it features the first report of the most notorious incident during the General Strike in the North East when pickets targetting a coal train they believed was being operated by blacklegs instead managed to derail the Flying Scotsman at Cramlington.

READ MORE: HOW PICKETS DERAILED THE FLYING SCOTSMAN DURING THE GENERAL STRIKE

Will Lawther, the MP for Barnard Castle from 1929 to 1931, who was arrested during the General Strike (Image: wikipedia)

As the strike came to a messy end, Lawther was tried at Gateshead on May 13 under the Government’s “Emergency Regulations” designed to crack down on strikers’ activities.

“Lawther denied that he was a Communist and that the people of Chopwell were terrified out of their wits by mob law,” said the Echo. “There was a demonstration outside the court. The police charged the crowd and two men were arrested.”

The Northern Echo of May 14, 1926, reporting on Lawther’s imprisonment (Image: Chris Lloyd)

Realising that Lawther was a political hot potato, and heeding Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s plea that “bygones should be bygones” now the strike was crumbling, the magistrates fined Lawther only £50 – the most lenient sentence possible. However, he refused to pay and was jailed for two months in Durham.

In 1929, the people of Barnard Castle – who have a surprising history of electing early Labour MPs – returned him to Parliament, although they booted him out two years later.

He became the first president of the National Union of Mineworkers and had Communist sympathies until the Second World War, after which he used his position on the Trades Union Congress to defeat the hard left.

He was knighted in 1949 – reputedly the first miner ever to be so honoured – and lived in Whitley Bay until his death in 1976.

A podcast series looking at Lawther’s role during the strike and at his remarkable career has just been created by the Find My Past genealogy website and features Jonathan Kindleysides, the Head of Industry at Beamish Museum. Google “A Family History of the General Strike” to find it.